Good bye Changelogs: Good or Bad?

Again if people would like to explore and do not want to know anything about new content they can:

- Put bugfixes and engine changes etc in the changelog
- Major changes (Hylotl Villages for instance) as a hint of what people can expect to find
- Anything else like new hats (are we in TF2?) and guns, swords, minibiomes in a Spoiler for people who want to know what they will find (like me).

Therefor people who are interested in exploring and keeping this "magic warm feeling" can ignore the said spoiler and yet would get all the important bugfixes and engine changes.
Bugfix notes should also contain rebalancing.

Are they planning to do that? Probaly not, I havent seen them even looking at this kind of topic. Not on reddit, not on here. Yet my assumption hasnt been disproven yet... again my assumption is they just sorta lazy, as many stated before, with the right way of networking and a little bit of dedication they could spend maybe half an hour on writing propper changelogs to avoid confusion and more trouble on the forums.

 

As it stands, the people who don't want spoilers are the only ones getting what they want. Pushing out the two other groups. 1) The bug testers 2)The collectors.
If the patches were perfect, I would have no problem with no change log. What worries me, is that buggy content can be released, and many release cycles can go on without someone finding the bug. I don't know how critical the new content is that they are releasing (it's probably based off of templates to keep it simple and accurate) but if a critical bug squeaks through and then new content is piled on top of it before it get addressed, there is the potential for headaches. I understand this depends on what type of content they plan to release undocumented, if it's just biomes, bases, and monsters... No problem, I can suck it up... But if it's something more involved like A.I. tweaks and improvements, a bug can be game breaking, and it would be nice to have an eye out for that sort of thing and get it early before new A.I. tweaks and improvements were added on top of the buggy code.

Edit....ninjad by __MeRLiN__

 

Hiding it by putting in in a folder with each patch that has a official changelog or something would be fine. Yet weird.

Just have to stress the idea of making sure people have no idea whats being put into what they are testing, is again a strange thought to me Blue. I do understand they stressed they wouldn't begin to leave out important changes, but I would count changing ore depth variation and other things as sort of important. Not earth shatteringly so, but you have to admit its weird this stuff isn't being be noted anywhere for testers anymore.

Don't get me wrong, doing what they can so people can enjoy things while testing is great. There is a line however where the game development has to come first, and being vague about changelogs is a strange decision. All I may add, just to make people who enjoy discovering things themselves happy over clear communication.

I've also not seen a lot of people that actually seem upset Chucklefish is posting changelogs. Could be wrong and not the point, but had to note it.

Edit: Ah, stricken then Ybb. Still feel it is a strange decision at the very least. Regardless, we'll probably see in the coming weeks what this brings.

 

To be completely fair, the Heck biome was completely disabled before, so the change just means they had a change of plans rather than changing something that was already there.

 

The easy was to satisfy both sides is to put patch notes in spoilers or something. So modders can figure out the new stuff, and the others don't have to worry about spoilers.

 

I get the feeling they weren't looking to please one side or another when making this change. They were having a hard time documenting all the content changes they were adding, so they decided on this course of action because it is easier for them.
I hope this thread and others like it let them know that there is a sizeable chunk of the community that don't like this.

 

unacceptable. open source software, developed in spare time and by folks who are unpaid usually has better version history (read: changelogs). of note, this includes "open" projects, where anyone can commit to the repo. if FOSS software can do it with no problems, why is a piece of software written by devs paid full time to work on it having problems?

or one of their usual vague summaries as the news post, and a REAL changelog.txt in the game files.

 

So paying for the privilege of testing their game wasnt enough? Now we have to do their patch notes ourselves too? Chucklefish just seems lazier and lazier every week.

 

That could work.

 

Yep, that was pretty much the first and the last time I buy early access, I cannot look into devs heads... if they change like this I will not support them in early stages anymore.

 

Funny I don't see anywhere the devs telling people to make the patchnotes for them.

 

No, but they did overtly say they aren't doing it anymore for anything but "engine updates." Which will presumably be like their previous "patch note" that include 5 vague bullet points and then "Plus some more." Refusing to do something and leaving the community to take up the torch isn't really any different from telling us to do it outright.

 

Yes it is. You are free to not do it

 

The basic presumption is that changelogs are essential to the testing process.

 

Only if something starts breaking. For instance, the heck treasure pool, which includes one weapon that does not exist and another weapon that is classified in an invalid manner (the treasure pool treats it as a generated gun when it is not). Or any mods which overwrote Heckbush1 through Heckbush5, which now need to change a directory to make it overwrite properly.

 

Changelogs are very important to alpha/beta testing and nobody can say otherwise, because people need to find these things to test as that is the entire point of alpha/beta testing.

With that being said. chucklefish has also shown that they are unwilling or incapable of operating or otherwise communicating in a professional manner that is required of them when it comes to running a business, of which they are. which only makes manners worse, of course the second part of my comment is based on part opinion and part observations. and if i am wrong i would like for you to say so.

 

I think the issue is that they've got a number of different builds at once and since so many of them live nowhere near each other it's really hard to get proper communications going. Also shortly before a patch is released they send all the builds to one person who's job is to mix and match them in a functional way and release it as soon as possible.

 

This is one example that keeps being dragged up, as if everything that breaks is because of mod conflicts. You need patch notes every time because sometimes unexpected stuff happens. Saying it's only needed "when something starts breaking" is ridiculous, you never know for sure when something is going to start breaking.

The thing is, they aren't the only telecommunication based indie studio. It's a challenge to overcome, just not doing so and making excuses (that may or may not be true, I mean, let's face it, that's all speculation) doesn't help anybody.

 

I agree that we probably don't want changelogs that detail every last thing.
But any significant changes should be listed, such as growth rates on certain farmables, specific types of monsters now having an instant-kill move,etc.

If it's like "Added more Avian guns" then that's fine, at least I know that Avians will now have a chance of dropping some new stuff, we don't need to be told every single damned details. But we do deserve to know what's been added, if Chucklefish as a whole is this scared of people being spoiled then have changelogs in 2 parts, first being the engine updates and the 2nd inside a spoiler tag being the content updates. Then just add a line like "The follow is Content Updates, do not read if you like surprises!".

Done.

Also the idea that it's too hard to track everything being added? I really hope that's not the problem else should we all expect a Starbound version of Hot Coffee? Or to see a chest with a giant pink dildo sword?

 

Chucklefish, kindly reconsider your decision to be vague in the changelogs--we need to know what to expect so we can test these things efficiently!